It was pretty bad when you find that the JS dos not have a inbuilt function on strings to do Trim. But not to worry. It can be implemented easily. function LTrim(str){ var whitespace = new String(" \t\n\r"); var s = new String(str); if (whitespace.indexOf(s.charAt(0)) != -1) { var j=0, i = s.length; while (j < i && whitespace.indexOf(s.charAt(j)) != -1) j++; s = s.substring(j, i); } return s; } function RTrim(str){ var whitespace = new String(" \t\n\r"); var s = new String(str); if (whitespace.indexOf(s.charAt(s.length-1)) != -1) { var i = s.length - 1; while (i >= 0 && whitespace.indexOf(s.charAt(i)) != -1) i--; s = s.substring(0, i+1); } return s; } function Trim(str){ return RTrim(LTrim(str)); }